Briefly Noted

“God,” “Hitler, My Neighbor,” “Improvement,” and “A State of Freedom.”

God, by Reza Aslan (Random House). Aslan’s first publication since his short-lived television series “Believer” is a brief survey of human conceptions of God, from the man-beast divinities found in prehistoric cave paintings to the one God of Islam. Drawing on evolutionary theory, Aslan argues that people have an “unconscious urge” to project their image onto God, since “we are the lens through which we understand the universe.” This urge has often led away from the idea of an embodied God to one in which God is a creative force underlying existence. Aslan is a believer in the latter. “I am, in my essential reality, God made manifest,” he writes. This conclusion has been reached before by many worthy thinkers; here, however, it arrives abruptly, in a book that merely skims subjects demanding weighty treatment.

Hitler, My Neighbor, by Edgar Feuchtwanger with Bertil Scali, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter (Other Press). In this disquieting coming-of-age story, narrated in the voice of the author’s childhood self, Feuchtwanger unfolds the surreal tale of the decade he spent living across the street from Hitler’s Munich apartment, from 1929 to 1939. Born to proudly German secular Jews, he had barely grasped that he was Jewish before he heard that Jews were evil and not really German. He can’t wrap his mind around the contradictions, but neither can many adults. Illuminating how it was possible for so many to be so confused is the book’s great achievement; young Edgar, seeing his famous neighbor frequently around town, can hardly believe that he truly means what he says on the radio.

Improvement, by Joan Silber (Counterpoint). This novel follows the far-reaching consequences stemming from two decisions. Reyna, a white single mother in gentrified Harlem, refuses to abet her boyfriend’s interstate cigarette-smuggling operation. And, decades earlier, her evasive, bohemian aunt returns to New York after eight years in Turkey. Those affected, some tragically, by these choices include a young home health aide, an adulterous trucker, and a volatile trio of German antiquities dealers. The book’s interwoven structure—literalized by a motif of Turkish rugs, bought and sold throughout the narrative—is overly schematic, especially as concerns race relations. But both the plot and the prose maintain an absorbing momentum. “People thought love was everything,” Silber writes, “but it could do so much and no more.”

A State of Freedom, by Neel Mukherjee (Norton). In this experimental novel, food communicates “affections and feelings . . . and often need, too.” For an urbane expat leading “a divided life” between London and Mumbai, the enormous, luxurious variety of cuisines lumped together as “Indian” provides inspiration. Others, however, struggle with the daily absence of food. One village girl is told by her starving mother that “God gave us stomachs to punish us.” Years later, well fed and working as a housemaid, she feels “a knot deep inside her” begin “its long, slow untwisting.” The characters are connected less by the slender narrative thread than by their acute awareness of inequity: “They didn’t mind; it didn’t occur to them that something such as minding existed.”

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